Lyric, History, and Genre

Ralph Cohen founded New Literary History in 1969, inaugurating the first of a series of journals of literary theory that exercised a powerful effect on criticism. Swiftly followed by diacritics (1970), SubStance (1971), boundary 2 (1973), Semiotexte (1974), and Critical Inquiry (1974), New Literary History is the only one to have been led for forty years by its founder, and I take this opportunity to pay homage to Ralph Cohen for his remarkable record of continuing intellectual leadership, as he hands over the journal to his younger colleagues. Established with the goal of revitalizing literary history, which had fallen into disrepute or at least neglect in the years of the New Criticism, the journal did not initially succeed on that front, though it did give prominence to the aesthetics of reception, which seemed at the time the most promising candidate for renovating literary history.¹ With a judicious sense of what was important, Ralph Cohen made New Literary History a major forum for the discussion and assimilation of European work in literary theory and for interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary studies in the humanities. In its eighth year, the journal changed the description offered on the masthead to reflect what had become its central mission, welcoming "theoretical articles on literature … and articles from other disciplines that help interpret or define the problems of literary history or literary study." But Ralph Cohen remained in his own work faithful to the project of rethinking literary history. His scholarship on James Thomson's The Seasons led to two monumental works, The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's "The Seasons" and the Language of Criticism, and The Unfolding of "The Seasons," which focused on problems of literary criticism by examining the critical reception of a poem that was reprinted an amazing number of times over the course of a century.

Above all, he saw to it that from time to time scholars returned to the problem of genre. Periodically devoting special issues of the journal to this unpopular topic, he kept it before us as a crucial concept for literary history, perhaps even the major site of literary history, since if literature is more than a succession of individual works, it may be at the level of genre (the modifications of genres, the rise of new genres, and the eclipse of the old), that literature has a history. But his claims for genre and genre study are even broader: "Genre study is more than another approach to literature or to social institutions or scientific practices; it analyzes our procedures for acquiring and accumulating knowledge, including the changes that knowledge undergoes."²

In an article entitled "History and Genre," Cohen quotes Fredric Jameson's claim in The Political Unconscious that genre criticism has been "thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice," and he sets about efficiently and systematically to consider reasons for the disparagement of the idea of genre and to elucidate a conception of genre that can be defended against common criticisms.³ Though skepticism about the idea of genre has remained powerful in literary studies, I believe there are signs of a growing recognition of the importance of generic categories. In 2007, PMLA devoted a special issue to "Remapping Genre"; the subject of the September 2009 meeting of The English Institute was simply "Genre"; and the so-called "new lyric studies" has sparked a lively debate about the validity and bearing of the notion of the lyric as a genre.⁴ It seems timely to take up the sort of argument offered by Ralph Cohen's discussion of the category of genre, its relation to history and importance to literary studies.

Traditionally, theorists say there are two sorts of theories of genres, empirical and theoretical; the latter is based on some claim about elementary possibilities of thought, representation, or discourse. Aristotle distinguishes literary types according to the possible modes and objects of representation. Northrop Frye bases genre categories on "radicals [root forms] of presentation": "words may be acted in front of a spectator, they may be spoken in front of a listener, they may be sung or chanted, and they may be written for...